In its effort to find a site to house Australia’s radioactive waste, the Federal Government’s National Radioactive Waste Management Project (NRWMP) has three sites currently under consideration in South Australia – one at Barndioota in the Flinders Ranges and two in Kimba on the Eyre Peninsula. Some of this nuclear waste is a hazard for hundreds of years and some for thousands of years.

Radioactive Nuclear waste dumps for non-SA wastes are illegal in SA. In response to earlier moves to dump waste in SA, Parliament passed a law to say No: the Nuclear Waste Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000. The objects of this Act are “to protect the health, safety and welfare of the people of South Australia and to protect the environment in which they live by prohibiting the establishment of certain nuclear waste storage facilities in this state.”

We’ve said no to radioactive waste in SA before and won and we’ll do it again!… Read more >>

Congratulations to ICAN, the group behind the recent treaty to ban nuclear weapons, for winning this year’s nobel peace prize.

ICAN Asia-Pacific director Tim Wright said the group was elated by the honour and hoped it would mount pressure on countries to join the movement to end the human destruction caused by nuclear weapons.

“We hope this will only boost our campaign and put pressure on countries who haven’t signed the treaty yet, including Australia,” he said.

“The Australian government, not only failed to participate in negotiations, but it actually tried very hard to stop the talks from taking place. We’re calling on Foreign Minister Julie Bishop to change Australia’s opposition to the treaty and sign just as our neighbours in south-east Asia and the Pacific have done.”

“If there is any time to prohibit the use of nuclear weapons, the time is surely now. This is a very dangerous moment in time and there is a very real risk that the situation could spiral out of control. We need to act now before these weapons are ever used again.”

More disastrous news for the nuclear power industry. In 2017 alone:
– clear signs of a major nuclear slow-down in China – the last remaining hope for the industry.
– the US nuclear power industry is in the middle of a full-blown crisis
– a seriously anti-nuclear government has been elected in South Korea
– Taiwan has reaffirmed a nuclear phase-out by 2025
– the South African nuclear power program was ruled illegal by the High Court and probably won’t be revived
– Switzerland voted in a referendum to phase out nuclear power (while all of Germany’s reactors will be closed by the end of 2022 and all of Belgium’s will be closed by the end of 2025).
– huge problems in the UK and France
– India’s nuclear power program is going nowhere and the government has implicitly acknowledged that plans for French EPR reactors and US AP1000 reactors will likely be shelved
– Japan’s nuclear power program remains in a miserable state
– Russia’s Rosatom has acknowledged that the pipeline for new reactors is fast drying upMeanwhile, the growth of renewables has been spectacular and will grow even faster over the coming years. Renewables will be producing 3 times as much electricity as nuclear power by 2022.

Jim Green, FoE Australia’s anti-nuclear campaigner, goes into more detail in this recent article for online opinion.… Read more >>

Civil society representatives firmly rejected genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a means of addressing world food security at a recent Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Malaysia. The event was funded by the pro-GM US, Canadian and Australian Governments.

Civil society representatives from the Global South rejected the premise of the event that improved access to agricultural biotechnologies are needed to help defeat hunger, malnutrition and poverty in the Asia-Pacific region.

The focus of the discussion was supposed to be on sustainable food systems for small farmers – not on increasing yields to generate more money from small pieces of land. However, the majority of the supposed ‘solutions’ presented at the meeting were GMOs – including many new GM techniques still at proof of concept stage that have not been subject to any kind of safety assessment.

Friends of the Earth (FoE) Melbourne is a non-for profit organisation working for a socially equitable and environmentally sustainable future. The international Friends of the Earth network is active in 77 countries with over 2 million members. Read more.

In November 2018, Victorians will head to the polls. With community concern about climate change on the rise, it's an issue that all political parties must address in detail. Our state is undergoing profound change as the population grows, entire industries go to the wall, and climate change starts to really impact on our landscapes, […]

A major new study released today by environment finance group and Friends of the Earth affiliate member group Market Forces has revealed many of Australia’s top 100 companies are failing to improve their climate risk disclosure.

An international coalition of civil society organisations has written to SMBC, Mizuho and MUFG, warning of the risks associated with financing the 1,200MW Nghi Son 2 coal-fired power plant in Thanh Hoa province, Vietnam.

Recently it was International Women's Day and we celebrated ALL the women - cis, non-binary, trans - who are part of the world wide movement for social and environmental justice. Despite being disproportionately affected by environmental injustice, women are not victims. Women are fighters. Women are protagonists in the defense of territories and the fight […]

VicForest has been charged for illegally logging rainforest in an East Gippsland logging coupe. The logging operation took place in the Serpentine Creek Rainforest Site of Significance near Cann River, causing serious damage to protected warm temperate rainforest.